The Fizzer changes horses at Renner's Springs for the "Downs' trip"; and
as his keen eyes run over the mob, his voice raps out their verdict like
an auctioneer's hammer. "He's fit. So is he. Cut that one out. That
colt's A1. The chestnut's done. So is the brown. I'll risk that mare.
That black's too fat." No hesitation: horse after horse rejected or
approved, until the team is complete; and then driving them before him he
faces the Open Downs--the Open Downs, where the last mail-man perished;
and only the men who know the Downs in the Dry know what he faces.
For five trips out of the eight, one hundred and thirty miles of
sun-baked, crab-holed, practically trackless plains, no sign of human
habitation anywhere, cracks that would swallow a man--"hardly enough
wood to boil a quart pot," the Fizzer says, and a sun-temperature
hovering about 160 degrees (there is no shade-temperature on the Downs);
shadeless, trackless, sun-baked, crab-holed plains, and the Fizzer's team
a moving speck in the centre of an immensity that, never diminishing and
never changing, moves onward with the team; an immensity of quivering
heat and glare, with that one tiny living speck in its centre, and in all
that hundred and thirty miles one drink for the horses at the end of the
first eighty.
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